Tulsi Gabbard attacks democrats for funding Trump Oppo Research

[karynnj]

239. Thanks for responding as you did

I responded because I did remember when we had posted years ago.

I think the horrific state of the union with Trump as President, is making it harder to get over the primaries. In 2004, though people were hopeful we would win, 2016 seemed a sure thing. This and the fact that Trump is completely unacceptable makes it much harder - even for people like me who did not have the strong emotional attachment to Clinton. Not to mention, the fact of Russian intervention and that the popular vote was so strongly for Clinton, leads to refusing to accept the loss as legitimate.

This is NOT surprising as neither 2000 or 2004 were considered legitimate losses on DU - though not elsewhere, even though 2000 was pretty clearly a win for Gore. At this time in 2005, the focus was already on 2008. In fact, before November 2004 was out, many were already looking to a Hillary Clinton win in 2008. The party was not really fundamentally split. All three 2008 candidates essentially ran on a variation of Kerry/Feingold on Iraq and the 2004 platform on everything else - with minor differences. Here, beyond anger over 2016 and Trump, there seems to be far less unity. I had thought, when I first sensed this in mid 2015, that it reflected that under Obama we made such strides on goals that we had accomplished most of the 2008 goals and there was no similar uniformity on what new goals were. (We had made big strides on healthcare, gay rights, climate change, and the economy.)

Just as the chaos of Trump is affecting the Republicans, it has kept us from moving on. However, when we do, a first step is to define what we see as things that must be done -- beyond the obvious of fixing things that Trump will have broken. I suspect that as we approach the end of 2018, we will gravitate to leaders who surface for 2020. One caveat - all possibilities will not compare in gravitas to past leaders .. at first.